Wolter wrote:
To be honest, I've never met anyone who overtly said that it was good Lincoln was assassinated. Or that Booth was a hero. I mean, law of averages says they're probably out there, but no one I knew had the brass ones to say that.

I can't even begin to express how sick at heart everything about this makes me. Literally everything I hear about what happened in my hometown and what every white person thinks about it is devastating and depressing and enfuriating.

Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.

. . .then society has failed at paying basic fucking attention to its surroundings. And I say this as a native of the state that bred Adam Lanza and who has one parent and two cousins who are public school teachers now having to be re-certified every year with school-shooting lockdown training and reporting procedures (totally toothless) for forwarding up the chain the students they think are gonna snap.

It doesn't matter if it's mental illness or racist fuckstain...self-absorption, ideology over common sense, and senseless tribalism (see also: self-absorption) breeds this shit. Exactly like America breeds terrorists in other countries. Only I fucking hate that they're calling this an act of terrorism because that's just another self-absorbed 'Murcan Exceptionalism excuse to shove this off as somebody else's problem. God...everything I learned 15 years ago as a Sociology major about the basic functioning of the social net, difference between treating deviants as society's public health issue vs. retribution for good/evil, and relation of it all to the violent crime rate is so utterly, senselessly prescient every goddamn fucking time this happens every goddamn fucking other month and proves every basic Soc. theory anew. If there was ever a personal experience that taught me that knowledge is NOT power--and in some cases a lesson in the exact depressing opposite--it's my choice of academic major as a resident of this goddamn country.

Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.